It's Europe Calling, Justin. You Might Want to Take This. No? Okay.

The EU elections showed that voters are abandoning old school politics and the same old, same old. Small wonder. Right wing populists appear to be the big winners but also rising is the Green Party.

People are worried. They can see what's coming. They can feel what has already arrived.

In Canada we have two "same old" parties. The Conservatives are the Party of Darkness when it comes to climate change. They're the ultimate in Petro-Pimps and they're scrambling to staunch an exodus of radical rightwing populists to Bernier. However, not far behind, is the modern shell of the once great Liberal Party who have also chosen the petro-state over the future of Canada even as they pay unconvincing lip service to the climate crisis.

Make no mistake. Today's LPC is not the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson or the real Trudeau, Pierre, just as today's Republican Party has nothing to do with the 'party of Lincoln.'

People can sense weakness. They can smell fear. And there's plenty of both emanating from the Liberal leadership. Justin has made his bed and he's sharing it with the petro-economy. "No one would find 173 billion barrels of oil and just leave it there." Even if that was true it was an incredibly stupid thing to say and an even dumber mantra around which to forge a government.

We thought Trudeau had vision from his campaign rhetoric in 2015. He was positively inspirational coming off nearly a decade of the Harper government. Only he wasted no time in reneging on those grand promises much like a snake sheds its skin. The Liberal Party faithful have been straining to downplay that ever since but, today, the best thing they have going for themselves is Andrew Scheer and the grim prospect of another Tory government. That speaks to just how hollow the Liberals have become. "Vote for Us, We're Not Him." Well, in a lot of respects you're pretty close.

The world is changing - rapidly, dangerously and, those determined not to see it excepted, we all know it. We can see where we're headed and what that means for our young people, our grandkids and the children they will have. Greta Thunberg and her army of followers remind us that parties like Canada's Conservatives and Liberals are not on their side. You have to dig pretty deep to deny that.

The world has been given a very narrow time frame to try to avert catastrophic climate change. We have to cut carbon emissions by half by 2030. Andrew Scheer and Justin Trudeau will not even acknowledge that much less commit to the sort of changes we would need to meet that obligation. And, yes, it is an obligation. Any genuine progressive would understand that, Liberals not so much.

The current government has fallen further and further behind even meeting Stephen Harper's emissions cuts targets, even as climate change has worsened considerably.  That's not progress. That's a retreat, a capitulation. Please, don't give me any of that nonsense about minuscule, gestural carbon tax.

The great Liberal leaders of the past worked to make Canada a better place, a greater nation. That vision disappeared from the party well before Justin Trudeau showed up.

Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and many others show what happens when governments fail to respond to popular discontent. These people are right there in the wings just waiting to pounce. They take that discontent, the fuel, and put the match of fear and anger to it. It works. It won't last long. Climate change is worsening. It's now a climate crisis. Climate deniers like Trump and Orban can't outrun it.

You may have noticed that the American mid-west is entering its second week of continuous severe weather events - high winds, heavy flooding rains, tornadoes. In large swathes of America's bread basket this year's crop is in peril.  In the west, the wildfire season is here, perhaps fittingly hitting Alberta hardest. Meanwhile their newly minted premier dismisses climate change as the "flavour of the month." That is a man holding his province and his people hostage to a dead end ideology.  Well, they chose him, they deserve no better. Canada, however, does deserve better. 'Same old, same old' has run its course.

Two weeks ago the Washington Post reported that temperatures in the Russian Arctic had hit 84 degrees F.  while atmospheric carbon dioxide hit 415 ppm. for the first time in human history. The next four years are predicted to be unduly hot which takes on a strange context given that the past many years have been record setting. I think that means we're in for "really, really hot weather."

Climate departure, now sometimes called "climate catastrophe" is predicted to begin setting in around 2023.  Back in 2013 Camilo Mora's climate team at the University of Hawaii released a paper on this troubling phenomenon that will hammer economies in affected nations and likely trigger mass migrations.  In the ensuing three years other studies corroborated what's coming.

According to this study, the tropics, which are the near-equatorial region of this planet that’s almost 100% impoverished, and that has thus contributed virtually nothing to global warming, will begin the period of permanent catastrophe starting in approximately 2020; but the (cooler) moderate-latitude countries, such as in North America and Europe, will begin this catastrophic period in or around 2047.

This isn’t to say that things won’t continue to get worse after then; it’s only to say that this is, as the article will be titled, “The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability.”
This landmark article was co-authored by a team of 14 climate-scientists. It says: “Unprecedented climates will occur earliest in the tropics and among low-income countries.” It explains that the reason for this is that the countries near the equator have far less variability in their weather than do the moderate-climate countries, and so the species that constitute the ecosystems there cannot tolerate temperatures outside their narrow range, which has existed within that narrow range for thousands of years. Consequently, species-extinctions will soar there much faster and earlier than here. The existing impoverished economies, within around 2,500 miles of the equator (where average per-capita incomes are less than 10% of the average in the moderate-latitude countries such as ours), will become unlivable.

This study notes the “obvious disparity between those who benefit from the process leading to climate change and those who will have to pay for most of the environmental and social costs.” Of course, “those who benefit from the process leading to climate change” are the oil companies, and the coal companies, and the natural gas companies, and the pipeline and service companies, and ultimately their owners: especially the aristocratic families who control them. It would be false to assume that any poor people, even in countries such as the United States, will benefit from continuation of “the process leading to climate change.” However, some of the chief financial backers of the Republican Party and of other conservative political parties in the moderate-latitude countries benefit enormously from that “process.” Thus, many people who will not benefit from climate change end up voting for climate change; and, of course, their children and subsequent descendants will suffer greatly from their votes.

The Colombia-born Dr. Mora, in an interview with Yale360,  tried to make the people of the developed world, that's us, understand  what we're doing to the weakest and most vulnerable people.

I grew up in a country where there has been a long history of violence. We have been in war for 50 years, and one thing people don’t realize is what it means to be in a place where anyone can get shot at any moment, where people are starved to death, where there is not enough food to feed people. In the first world, people don’t know how rich they are, and they don’t realize what is happening in the rest of the world. And for me that’s a driving force. It’s scary to think about climate change because when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way. I’m telling you, I have seen it in my own country. It’s very negative the way in which people react to hunger. And that’s one of the things that’s most frightening to me with this large-scale analysis — the fact that I know we’re on our way to some very disturbing scenarios if we go down this pathway of damaging physical systems in the ways that we are today.

We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 for us, not for them. Those little brown people with their already precarious lives and their devastated homelands, they're hooped.  And yet Liberals and Tories alike think it's entirely reasonable to flood world markets with high-carbon, high-cost, low value bitumen. That's what it means to be a Liberal on the cusp of this next decade.

We're just a few months away from choosing our next government. It will pit Andrew Scheer, a man whose promises, odious as they are, can probably be trusted versus the current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, a man who has shown his solemn promises to be thoroughly unreliable. Great choice.

This year will be our last chance to make a difference. Four years from now, catastrophic climate change will be locked in.

This Is What Gives Them Away

A lot of stupid people in Canada have come to think of Athabasca bitumen as "oil." That is the single most important victory the petro-state has achieved.

It's not oil. It may be turned into oil at a distant refinery, probably in the States  but we're told even in Asia, at some time, somewhere. Until it leaves that distant refinery it's something quite different from  any conventional oil.

"They" - the federal and provincial governments, our bitumen-friendly media, and the Oil Patch - are lying to us about this stuff, filling your mind with images of something that is not. Whether it comes out of Justin Trudeau's mouth or Andrew Scheer's mouth or Jason Kenney's mouth, they're feeding you carefully contrived horse shit and, by the look of things, you've got a taste for it now.

They don't want you to trouble your precious minds with what they're really doing. They don't want you dwelling on what's really in the crap they're squeezing through their pipelines.

They don't want you dwelling on the ultra-high carbon, granulated coal in their crud - petcoke. Out of sight/out of mind. That stuff gets refined out. Then it gets sold wherever no one is too fussy about burning it. It's a lot worse, pound for pound, than brown or thermal coal, the real garbage stuff.

They'll howl like cut cats at the first mention of the lethal toxins embedded in  unrefined dilbit.

The heavy metals, rated as priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, include mercury, arsenic, beryllium, copper, cadmium, thallium, lead, nickel, zinc and silver. All are toxic. Arsenic is a known human carcinogen; cadmium can severely destroy the kidneys and other organs; and thallium is so poisonous that it pops up in Agatha Christie mysteries as a murder weapon.

That stuff threatens environmental catastrophe wherever a dilbit pipeline runs. It threatens British Columbia's pristine coastal ecology with every wallowing supertanker that navigates our waters.

They know that a dilbit spill in BC waters is virtually beyond clean up. They know that the diluent quickly evaporates out leaving the dense bitumen to sink to the bottom, hundreds of feet down, where it can never be cleaned up and will destroy the marine food chain for many decades, perhaps forever.



They know how pernicious and devastating this crud is. That's why Trudeau's environment minister, Dame Cathy McKenna, has approved the use of Corexit as an "oil dispersent." It's nothing of the sort. It's an outrageous lie whether it comes out of Cathy's mouth or Justin's.  Corexit doesn't disperse oil, even ordinary conventional crude oil. It sinks spilled oil to the bottom. Out of sight/out of mind. It was used in Price William Sound for the Exxon Valdez. It was used in the Gulf of Mexico for the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. It has one purpose - to make the problem go away for those who can turn their backs on what they've done.

Crews are regularly sickened by Corexit. Most of the crews that worked the Exxon Valdez spill fell seriously ill.  Just read the warning label from Nalco, the producer of Corexit.

Corexit is for use on spills on land. Nalco's clean up directions make that obvious.

"Do not contaminate surface water." As if.

There is no justification whatsoever for exposing my province, my land, my coast to this environmental disaster in waiting. All these things - the toxins, the petcoke, the acids and abrasives - could easily be refined out in Alberta, in Athabasca.

The thing is. If they were responsible - Alberta or the feds - and showed just a little respect for British Columbia and demanded that it be refined on site, it would expose how worthless this high-carbon/high-cost/low-value garbage fossil fuel really is.

Despite all this these bastards threaten us. They jail us and give us criminal records.  It's ironic that we should be going to jail, not them. It's pretty rich to hear Liberals whine that, if we don't vote for their boy, we're electing Andrew Scheer. What a laugh.

This Could Be Another Difficult Day for Mr. Trudeau

He panicked and tossed away $4.5 billion on a pipeline project, money we might not (probably won't) get back. He's about to pour another seven to nine billion into constructing the Justin Trudeau Memorial Trans-Mountain Pipeline.

At the time the prime minister justified this climate wrecking venture as the price we had to pay to bring Alberta onside with carbon pricing, emissions cuts.  The outgoing premier of Alberta, Rachel Notley, dutifully nodded, a wry smile crossing her lips.

The predicted incoming premier, Jason Kenney, won't be fulfilling Ms. Notley's eco-pledges. He will, however, expect Justin to finish that pipeline and be quick about it. And Jason knows Justin can be played.

Welcome to a future of pipeline politics, an issue tailor-made for greasy pols like Kenney.

Jason knows that the Sword of Damocles hangs over Alberta's bitumen pits. With the price of both clean energy generation and storage plummeting, the writing is on the wall for high-carbon/high-cost/low-value fossil fuels - i.e. bitumen. The halcyon days of the Tar Sands are over. Analysis after analysis reach the same conclusion - it will still sell in limited amounts at marginal prices.

There'll be blame aplenty and endless finger-pointing by those not wanting to get their fair share. For some, such as Kenney, an easy out will be the pipeline. The popular narrative, implausible but ingrained, is that Alberta's economic woes are the result of a lack of pipeline capacity. Ottawa has dragged its heels, British Columbia has thwarted Alberta's divine right to imperil BC's coast, yada, yada, yada.

Blaming outsiders is key to ignoring that Alberta's real woes are self-inflicted. It's economy is internally destabilized by provincial energy policy.

During the era of Ralph Klein the people of Alberta were conned into believing they could live beyond their means. Oil and bitumen royalties would cover the tab. No need for sales taxes. Those were for losers. A lot of them still believe that nonsense.

Jim Prentice wanted to bring back the long pants (i.e. taxes) but, when he sought a mandate in 2015, Alberta voters punished the PCs, ending their 40 year reign and consigning them to third place.

Alberta would remain a place that could pay its bills and provide basic services so long as oil prices were booming. That's high-grade stupid.

The delusions of oil run deep across Alberta but, like most fantasies, they can leave scars when they're taken seriously. In Alberta, even education has been neglected, unable to overcome the allure of easy money in the oil patch.

While postsecondary education is not an issue that will get the blood of Albertans boiling the way Quebec and equalization do, it’s arguably far more important to the province’s future. In fact, there is an incipient crisis in this area that so far has been largely ignored by Alberta’s political masters. 

Here is the problem. 

Over the past several decades, young Albertans – especially young men – could get good-paying jobs in the oil patch right out of high school. That’s no longer the case – and likely won’t be ever again. And beyond disruptions in the global energy market, advances in the world of technology – robotics, artificial intelligence, among others – are also affecting job opportunities for low-educated workers.

...Alberta has the lowest participation rates for postsecondary education in the country. According to a recent paper done for the Council of Post-Secondary Presidents of Alberta, between 2007 and 2014 the participation rate for men and women 18 to 34 averaged just 17 per cent. Nationally, that rate fluctuated between 22 and 24 per cent.

...Others have tried to sound the alarm about Alberta’s dismal record on research and innovation, which is what the future is all about. The province received an overall grade of D from the Conference Board of Canada in itsinnovation report card, with a particularly poor mark for research and development. 

In its paper, the council also points to something a recent TD Economics study called the “scarring effect.” This is the wage penalty associated with the period of unemployment for youth first entering the work force; the longer young people sit on the sidelines without a job, the greater the impact it has on both their future earnings and the economy overall. In a province with an outsized number of kids without any secondary education, this could be significant.

Today's editorials in the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald back Kenney all the way as though, once Notley is driven out, Alberta's petro-economy will return the province to bountiful prosperity of its past glory. Full steam ahead and spare not a thought to the consequences. This brought to mind a recent column written by Andrew Nikiforuk in The Tyee, "The Coddling of the Alberta Mind."

Oil, a commodity that nurtures dependency, has so coddled the Alberta mind that it has fostered a provincial culture of victimization as poisonous as the identity politics unsettling university campuses.

...Every day the province’s oil-obsessed politicos warn Albertans that Canada is a dangerous place full of self-righteous climate activists (and some are indeed self-righteous), anti-pipeline protestors, dumb courts, stubborn First Nations, and nasty liberals. 

Moreover the province’s potential for offence-taking has become as grand as Justin Trudeau’s vindictive Liberal Party of Canada. It can’t tolerate any truth-telling either.

...Albertans have become such a fragile, oil-reliant people, reasons Kenney, that the province now needs the equivalent of university Bias Response Teams, in this case to foster “a safe and inclusive environment” for its petroleum exporters who have now claimed Alberta’s identity as their own. 

(The rulers of Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia, we should remember, don’t much like oil critics, either. The political records show that oil relishes conflict and breeds political aggression like no other commodity, except cocaine.) 

...Over many years, Alberta’s Tories repeatedly gambled that the price of bitumen, a garbage crude that requires upgrading and complex refining, could only go higher, and they bet wrong.

So did the NDP, another oil-coddled entity. (And yes, Albertans should be very angry about the gross mismanagement of their gas and oil resources by their elected politicians.)

...Coddling a mind is a terrible thing, but coddling a province is a social disaster.

In the current election campaign, no politician wants to pony up and tell the truth.

It wasn’t foreigners or bad actors who created Alberta’s failings; it was Albertans and their damn greed and lack of strategic planning.

Albertans, and only Albertans, share the blame for not collecting their fair share and saving for a rainy day. 

All the angry talk about leaving Canada is the whinging of coddled minds in the land of the Wild Rose. Kenney knows how to play the victim card even better than Notley and, barring some miraculous turnaround in markets for high-cost/high-carbon/low-value sludge bitumen, Kenney is going to be looking for whipping boys.

Just like Trump's Gullibillies, Kenney has a ready-made base of easily-manipulated dupes and he has the manual for their care and feeding. He's a bit like the Nigel Farage of western Canada with Andrew Scheer a dull impersonation of Boris Johnson. They've got their sights set on Justin Trudeau and, for that matter, British Columbia. This could be a long and difficult night for the prime minister and for B.C.

Norway Shines a Light We Don't Care to See

Little Norway and it's big sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, are once again leading the way, this time by plunging into alternative clean energy investment. Not for the first time Norway is demonstrating how screwed up Canadian energy policy has become and will continue to be until we get competent political leadership that, sadly, is nowhere on the horizon.

The first time was when Norway adopted Peter Lougheed's advice on managing fossil energy resources. Norway went by Peter's book. Alberta, they had this guy named Klein with other ideas. The Norse quietly went around gathering their North Sea resource wealth, banking it in their sovereign wealth fund, and ultimately amassed a fortune. Klein, and every incompetent yahoo who followed him plunged his province onto a whipsaw of boom and busts that Albertans periodically celebrate with bumper stickers reading, "Dear God, please give us another oil boom and, this time, we promise we won't just piss it all away."  God must be tired of hearing that.

Part of that Norwegian miracle is not pissing their wealth away. That means they have to find ways to invest their money that will deliver reliable returns and grow their fund ever larger.  And they've chosen to invest in clean, renewable energy.

Norway’s $1tn oil fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, is to plunge billions of dollars into wind and solar power projects. The decision follows Saudi Arabia’s oil fund selling off its last oil and gas assets. 

Other national funds built up from oil profits are also thought to be ramping up their investments in renewables. The moves show that countries that got rich on fossil fuels are diversifying their investments and seeking future profits in the clean energy needed to combat climate change. Analysts say the investments are likely to power faster growth of green energy. 

Norway’s government gave the go-ahead on Friday for its fund to invest in renewable energy projects that are not listed on stock markets. Unlisted projects make up more than two-thirds of the whole renewable infrastructure market, which is worth trillions of dollars.

You see, Norway has an approach that could be summed up in a word, oh let me see, "responsible." By contrast, Canada's politicians have been as responsible as a crack addict. They're like junkies when it comes to royalties. They'll take whatever pittance the foreign energy giants throw their way. Then, when they do get some money, like their own bumper stickers admit, they just "piss it all away." It's gone, they have nothing to show for it.

The Globe's Gary Mason touched on Alberta's juvenile recklessness in a recent column, "Jim Prentice was Right."

In the run-up to the 2015 election, then-Alberta Premier Jim Prentice was asked by an interviewer about the perilous state of the province’s finances, which had recently taken a nasty negative turn as a result of a precipitous drop in oil prices.

“In terms of who is responsible,” Mr. Prentice said at the time, “we all need to look in the mirror, right. Basically all of us have had the best of everything and have not had to pay for what it costs.”

...And in Alberta, there are many people who can’t handle the truth. 

The fact is, the province’s fiscal situation isn’t much different today than it was for Mr. Prentice, and Alison Redford before him, and Ed Stelmach before her and Ralph Klein before him. You get the idea. Alberta still relies on the vagaries of the oil industry to pay many of its bills, which is as foolish a strategy now as it was when it first began decades ago.

Actually, you could convincingly make the argument it’s an even worse concept in these times, given the increasingly complex, and unpredictable, nature of a global energy market witnessing a world transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Too many in Alberta want to believe that a new pipeline will fix all that ails the province. That’s a fantasy, one that even the political leaders running to govern the province understand (but won’t admit publicly). A new pipeline would provide a temporary fix, and it would stanch, for a few years, the fiscal bleeding that is taking place. But ultimately, all it would do is allow the government to return to using oil revenues to balance the books, allow a province to live beyond its true means for a few more years.

Justin and Rachel and Jason think that British Columbia should bear the environmental risk of their "Piss It All Away" game, that we should give into these thugs and their crack addict mentality. They feel entitled, there's no other word but "entitled" to put our pristine coastal waters at risk of environmental catastrophe so that they can live beyond their means, just a little bit longer.

I know, let's consult the ancient Greek goddess, Themis.

Now, put permanent environmental catastrophe in one pan, we'll call it British Columbia, and in the other you put rapidly evaporating bitumen royalties that we'll call Alberta. As Peter Lougheed so clearly warned, they just evaporate, leaving ruin in their wake.  Wow, the environmental catastrophe hasn't changed but that gotta-have-it cash, it's gone. There's a clear winner - British Columbia.

Look at that. I haven't even mentioned the climate change impacts of high-carbon, pet coke laden dilbit or the quarter trillion dollar cleanup nightmare of the Athabasca Tar Sands tailing ponds. We'll surely get to that another time.

Today this is just about the puerile recklessness of Justin, Rachel and Jason and the thuggery in the way they threaten and imperil my province, British Columbia, and my coast, the Salish Sea.

What Has Jason Kenney Been Smoking?

Seriously.  I'm wondering if our fledgling defence minister was high, high, high, when he proclaimed that, after we defeat ISIS,  Iraq and Syria better not look to Canada to create a model democracy in those states.

That's sort of like me asking the confirmed bachelor if he's stopped beating his wife yet.  Apparently, though, Mr. Kenney foresees that we are going to defeat ISIS.  Where?  How?  When?

He's an amicable little shit but I think minister Kenney is in way over his head on this portfolio.  Fortunately for Kenney, Canada has already outsourced most of our foreign and defence policy decisions to Washington.  All he has to do is listen for America's dog whistle.

It's really not all that bad so long as you don't expect Jason Kenney, ISIS Slayer to make a whole  lot of sense.